Italian renaissance scholar, Bloomsbury art critic and
curator of European painting, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1904-1910. Fry was born to Sir
Edward Fry (1827–1918), a judge and Mariabella Hodgkin (Fry) (1833–1930) and raised in a Quaker
household. Although headed for a career in science at Clifton College, Bristol,
the lectures of John H. Middleton, Slade Professor of Art, impressed Fry.
Fry graduated from King’s College, Cambridge, with firsts in natural sciences,
1887 and 1888. Partially to please his father he dabbled in scientific areas
while studying studio painting on the side. Entirely won over to art, he
traveled to Italy in 1891 and studied studio painting at the Académie
Julian, Paris in 1892. Returning to Italy and resolving to study art
history, he read the works of Giovanni Morelli on connoisseurship and
Walter Pater. His acquaintance with the scholar Bernard Berenson likely happened during this time.
Fry soon established a reputation as a scholar of Italian art, lecturing on the
subject for the Cambridge Extension Movement. Still painting, he met
and married a fellow art student Helen Coombe (1864–1937) in 1896. Shortly thereafter Helen
began exhibiting signs of mental illness, was hospitalized in 1899 but recovered
somewhat. Fry's articles from 1900 onwards in the Athenaeum led to
a regular position writing art criticism. His first book on one of the Old
Masters, Giovanni Bellini (1899) appeared at this time. Part of a group
of English-speaking art experts, whose ranks included his friends Berenson and Herbert P. Horne, Fry used his influence to help found The
Burlington Magazine in 1903. As an Italian Renaissance scholar, he
sided with Berenson against R. Langton Douglas in the famous connoisseurship-vs.-documentary art history feuds. His first solo show of his painting was held at the Carfax Gallery in 1903. Failing to be appointed as Slade Professor
at Oxford in 1904, Fry accepted an invitation from J. Pierpont Morgan
(1837-1913) to visit
the United States and consider the position of Curator of European Painting of
the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Although Fry hoped to succeed Edward Poynter as Director of the National Gallery in London, which ironically
became available immediately after Fry accepted the Metropolitan job, Fry took the New York position,
succeeding George H. Story. As Morgan's hand-picked
curator, Fry accompanied the multi-millionaire on buying trips to Europe, now
with a title of "European Adviser." Fry edited Joshua Reynolds' Discourses,
which appeared in 1905. This marked the last of
his interest in the Old Masters. The same year Fry encountered Matthew Prichard, then a curator of classical antiquities at the Boston Museum of Fine Art, who exposed him to his Bergsonian view of museology, but also oriental and modern art. In 1906 Fry and Prichard met again, in Paris, where Prichard connected for Fry a relationship with Byzantine and modern art (Nelson, 161). Fry saw the work of Paul Cézanne for the first time the same year and from
that moment, devoted his energies to modern art. The following year Fry persuaded the
Metropolitan Museum Board to release him from his Curator position in favor of a title as "European
advisor," living in England. In 1910, however, a dispute with
Morgan, who was Chairman of the Board of the Metropolitan, led to his dismissal.
Fry's wife was re-committed to an asylum. Fry met the painter Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) and her husband, the critic [Arthur] Clive Bell (1881–1964), the same year, 1910, and emerged as a major figure in the circle of artists and writers known as the Bloomsbury group. The group, whose most famous member was the writer Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), was engaged in tradition-breaking practices; Fry and Vanessa Bell became lovers for the years 1911-1913. Fry opened the
exhibition "Manet and the Post-Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries," coining the term Post-Impressionist.
England was not entirely prepared for the modernist sensibilities and Fry was
denounced in the press, including the London
Times. Fry took the criticism favorably and
mounted a second show at Grafton Galleries in 1912, establishing for himself
the reputation as the champion of modern art. Part of Fry's devotion to
modern art was the direct application, as Fry saw it, to common Arts and Crafts
Movement form. He read papers on art at the Fabian Society and founded the
Omega Workshops which manufactured quality-designed modernist objects. Young
artists decorated furniture, designed fabrics, and pottery in the new
Post-Impressionist style. Fry himself continued to paint, now in a looser
decorative idiom. Wyndham Lewis was among the artists he employed at the Workshops.
The First World War forced the collapse of the Omega project. In 1919 Fry forced both Lionelle Cust and More Adey, both joint editors of the Burlington Magazine, out of the periodical after a bitter dispute. Fry achieved a fame as a art critic similar to John Ruskin half a
century before with the 1920 publication of his collected essays from the Fabian Society and
Burlington Magazine, titled
Vision and Design. Fry and Vanessa Bell briefly had a second relationship in 1921. However, in 1925 he met Helen Maitland Anrep (1885-1965) at a party in Bell's studio; Anrep left her husband and family to live with Fry the rest of his life. Fry's second collected essays, Transformations,
appeared in 1926. Already, Fry was at work on his most thought-through
book, Cézanne (1927). Both the first
serious account of the artist’s life as well as the first to show the relation
of Cézanne’s watercolors to his late oil painting, Fry established himself as a
modernist
art historian as well as a critic. After a second denial of a Slade
Professorship at Oxford in 1927, Fry accepted a similar Slade Professor position
at Cambridge in 1933. In his inaugural lectures for the Slade appointment, Art History as an Academic Study, Fry espoused a chronological approach to art. After the
lecture on Greek art in the series, however, he sustained in a fall in 1934 and
died of apparent heart failure connected to his trauma. The Slade
lectures were published as Last Lectures in 1939. Virginia Woolf wrote his biography, published in 1940, but largely confined herself to the public record out of deference to his relationship with her sister and her friend, Anrep.

Fry's clearest
thoughts on art, according to Kenneth Clark, appeared in the introduction to Reynold's Discourses. Fry and Clive Bell enjoyed mutual inspiration from one another. It was Bell's 1914 polemic Art that introduced the concept of "significant form" to Fry, which would subsequently be more associated with Fry than Bell. In the essays of Vision and Design, Fry
stated his case that all art could and should be appreciated principally by its
"significant form." To a public suspicious of complicated modernist theories and the notion of expertising,
Fry's viewer-approach dictum appealed to many. His books convinced a vast readership of the qualities of modern art. Fry criticized the German model
of art scholarship in 1933 as seeing works of art "almost entirely from a
chronological point of view, as coefficients of a time sequence, without
reference to their aesthetic significance." Fry's populist approach to art became so pervasive that some thirty years
later the German-American art historian Rudolf Wittkower decried it in his own lecture, "Art
History as a Discipline." He owed much to Morelli
and Pater,
the latter of whom he remarked in 1898, "makes so many mistakes about pictures; but the
strange, and for a Morelli-ite disappointing, thing is that the net result is so
very just." (quoted, Ladis). His early monographs on Bellini and
Veronese were the best writings on those artists of the time. Throughout his life, he continued to paint and always considered himself an artist as well as an art historian. LS